Lifelines: Biology Beyond Determinism

by Steven Rose

Book Overview

Reductionism--understanding complex processes by breaking them into simpler elements--dominates scientific thinking around the world and has certainly proved a powerful tool, leading to major discoveries in every field of science. But reductionism can be taken too far, especially in the life sciences, where sociobiological thinking has bordered on biological determinism. Thus popular science writers such as Richard Dawkins, author of the highly influential...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195120353
• ISBN13: 9780195120356
• Release Date: December 1997
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.0" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

An Argument for Complexity

There has been a general argument going on for several years in biology over deterministic reductionism (as exemplified by sociobiology and evolutionary psychology) and its implications (actually the restarting of an argument that has flared up every so often over the last few hundred years at least!) Unfortunately almost all of the participants are given to overstatement and polemical diatribes when deriding their opponents (an unfortunate human habit, perhaps adaptive in providing the derider with more progeny?} Steven Rose, a Professor of Biology at Britain's Open University, jumped into this debate in 1998 with his "Lifelines", which I have just gotten around to reading. The first part in indeed very engaging. In fact I pretty much agree with both Rose and Ernst Mayr ("Toward a New Philosophy of Biology") that reduction of an organism to the level of molecules only tells part of the story. Indeed, James Watson's view that "there is only one science, physics: everything else is social work" and his insistence that organismic biology was a waste of time stimulated E. O. Wilson to develop sociobiology in order to save some part of organismic biology at Harvard! Rose goes on to expand on Theodosius Dobzhansky's thought that "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" by adding both the history of the earth and the history of biological thought as well, a grouping of which I heartily approve. If you do not understand how we got to this point in the scientific dialog, you really cannot understand the debate! An example of one contentious argument developed in this book is that of the effects of sexual selection on human reproductive success. Rose's point (in chapter seven) that rich men are not automatically reproductively successful is not without foundation, but must also be compared to the success in this area by very rich men such as Kings and Sultans, who were successful enough to get large harems and thus produce large numbers of offspring. It simply may not work as well today because rich men are not as often allowed the luxury of obtaining a huge number of wives (but see the Sultan of Brunei!) Many modern rich men may have substituted money for sex as their main preoccupation! However, from a purely genetic point of view, at least some rich men may be unfit to produce viable progeny. Also social custom, such as the killing of siblings as possible rivals (as was notorious in the Ottoman Empire) and female infanticide (common in China and India) can mitigate that success. Finally wealth does not guarantee successful child rearing! It might also be noted that in most countries large families often were poor ones! Poor people needed more hands to do the work and might have 20 children by one or more wives! On top of everything else, we have no idea how humans behaved in the Pleistocene! Behavior is not fossilized! As usual things are more complicated then we might think, whatever the "apparent" tendency! Unfor

Complexity replaces reductionism

First, I note that most of the other people who wrote a review of this book are unsympathetic. Several note that--unlike Dawkins--Rose does not fill his book with a myriad of examples drawn from biology as does Dawkins. However, Rose is not a biologist. Rather he is a biochemist whose specialty is the biochemistry of memory in the brain. And to give Rose credit he does introduce a number of notions from biochemistry. Second, if this book had been written in the latter half of the nineteenth century I would dare hazard that it would have been titled: A Treatise on Philosophical Biology. I don't know how many people have actually read his book, but I would wager that with such a formidable title fewer still would have been enticed to read it. If I had written this book, I might have called it The Complexity of Life Trajectories, but Lifelines is mercifully brief and non-threatening. It would be interesting if we knew what potential titles flitted through Rose's mind (brain) while he was composing the book. Given this, what is Rose's chief aim in the book? I think he is anxious to distinguish several forms of reductionism, particularly methodological reductionism from philosophical reductionism. Has reductionism been successful as the dominant methodology for science in the past three-and-a-half centuries? Even Rose admits that it has been spectacularly successful. Breaking things down into their constituent parts and carefully isolating a variable and investigating its effect by changing it under carefully controlled conditions has enabled humans to achieve success after success in mastering and controlling the physical world. In addition, this methodology is very amenable to mathematical treatment. Reductionism does work and under the right conditions it works exceedingly well indeed. Rose's concern, and it is a paramount concern, is when methodological reductionism (a very good practice for working scientists) ends up as philosophical reductionism. He points out that once you start down the slippery slope of philosophical reductionism, you will ultimately end in the belief that the entire universe, all the one hundred billion or so galaxies each having billions of stars, and all human beings who have ever lived, are living now, and who will ever live, who we are--are desires, drives, loves, hates, you name it--can ultimately be explainable by one master equation--the holy grail of reductionist physics--the so-called theory of everything, which Rose reduces to its ultimate risible acronym, TOE. This proposition is so patently ridiculous as to be a howler of the first magnitude, but plenty of people exist who believe it. Stopping at biological reductionism, all human beings--and all life on Earth--are reduced to nothing but their genes, conceived of as atom-like entities. Then when the master equation of gene interactions is worked out, this will thus explain once and forever all human behavior. This idea is again so patently ridiculous as to

Excellent book

I found this book an enlightening book of biology and the current reductionistic philosophy now in vogue. Includes an interesting study of the history of science and its paradigms. Here's a quote: Being and becoming Living organisms exist in four dimensions, the three of space and one of time, and cannot be 'read off' from the single dimension that constitutes the strand of DNA. Organisms are not empty phenotypes, related one-to-one to particular patterns of genes. Our lives form a developmental trajectory, or lifeline, stabilized by the operation of homeodynamic principles. This trajectory is not determined by our genes, nor partitioned into neatly dichotomous categories called nature and nurture. Rather, it is an autopoietic process, shaped by the interplay of specificity and plasticity. In so far as any aspect of life can be said to be 'in the genes', our genes provide the capacity for both specificity -- a lifeline relatively impervious to developmental and environmental buffeting -- and plasticity -- the ability to respond appropriately to unpredictable environmental contingency, that is, to experience. This autopoletic interplay is in some senses captured by that old paradox of Xeno -- the arrow shot at a target, which at any instant of time must be both somewhere and in transit to somewhere else. Reductionism ignores the paradox and freezes life at a moment of time. In attempting to capture its being, it loses its becoming, turning processes into reified objects. This is why reductionism always ends by impaling itself on a mythical dichotomy of materialist determinism and non-material free-will. Autopoiesis, self-construction, resolves these paradoxes. (p. 306)